This got me to wondering about the practical lifespan of online games. Is five years as long as a game can be expected to go if it’s not a major success? Should they even keep going past that point, or is it better to “put a game out to pasture” in a dignified manner than to let it limp along?

Even though I’ll use specific examples, I’m not suggesting any particular game be shut down because “lol that game’s dead.” And the “five-year” rule certainly doesn’t apply to everything; PvP games tend to have a longer shelf life than most, due in part to the relatively little development needed to keep them afloat. For the most part, this will be about primarily PvE MMORPGs, which have their exceptions (World of Warcraft most notably) but which do seem to be greatly lessened after a certain point.

As we always knew (and was recently quantified), free-to-play MMOs, and probably all MMOs in general, tend to decline sharply after their launch. When I was working on collectible card games, I was told that you only needed 18 months to determine if a game was going to be a long-term success. Given the longer development cycle and expense of an MMO, it makes sense to give it a little longer, but by the time five years have elapsed, pretty much everyone who’s going to try a game has done so and either chosen to play it or not to. There’s virtually no acquisition potential left, and existing players are fairly steady but will inevitably trickle away as new things grab their attention.

Eventually, reality has to settle in. The people managing a five-year-old MMO have to know that what they’ve got is all they’re ever going to get. On the balance sheet, they might be OK with their minimal return versus their relatively minimal ongoing costs, but is that enough to satisfy the players?

Players of an online game, especially a PvE MMORPG, always want more, more, more. If they don’t get it, they’re going to try something else, and these days, there are a whole lot of “something elses” out there, and they’re usually free to at least try, making it easy to lure folks away from their existing hobbies.

When a game is aging, and there’s no sign of a cash infusion, content delivery slows down. When content delivery slows down, some players tend to look elsewhere. When some players look elsewhere, that leaves fewer players for the diehards, who then leave, and so on and so forth. It’s a downard spiral that might be stabilized but never reversed. And, if things get particularly dire, we have things like what happened with Perfect World Entertainment or the EverQuest team at Daybreak.

What’s the proper solution? Is it to keep “chugging along” like Champions Online or is it to (pardon the puns) freeze game development or just “let it go”? Just like the CCG players I encountered decades ago, MMO players have an expectation that their game will go on forever, with updates proceeding now until the end of time. After all, it’s EverQuest, not LimitedTimeQuest. Every game is different, but the reality of the situation dictates that everything can’t be as it was when a game was new and fresh, with money rolling in and content updates proceeding apace, as it is five years or so down the line.

As we’ve seen with City of Heroes and Star Wars: Galaxies, shutting down once-popular, but aging and lightly populated, games can lead to a massive PR hit. Maybe the better solution is to keep a game going in “maintenance mode,” keeping it alive but with no new development, as ArenaNet has done with the first Guild Wars. Granted, having a new game, Guild Wars 2 in this case, made that decision a little easier to stomach for fans of the original. With EverQuest Next in the works, Daybreak may be able to pull that off with EverQuest or EverQuest II, but would it be a possibility for a game like Champions Online or other Perfect World or Daybreak games?

As you might know, I’ve played The Lord of the Rings Online since beta – eight years ago in April – and while I’m not into it as much as I used to be, this topic hits home for me. I suppose I’d be sad to see it go, and there are still people rabidly devoted to the game who would feel the pain of its shuttering even worse.

But I also remember how much fun the game used to be in its first couple of years, and I don’t think that’s just a case of rose-colored glasses. I don’t need a talkative ex-Turbine employee to tell me that the game doesn’t bring in as much money and get as much development as it used to; it’s obvious just by playing. For me, LOTRO is still nice as an occasional diversion, but it’s a shadow of what it used to be. Sometimes I feel like I’d be OK with it going away entirely, because it’s never going to go back to what it once was. I’ve (mostly) moved on, and have loads of other entertainment options to occupy my time.

Still, it’s nice to run around in Middle-earth from time to time, and I wouldn’t mind seeing LOTRO dropped into some kind of maintenance mode like Guild Wars, so I could visit the Shire, Rivendell, Moria, and Gondor effectively forever. Granted, the Lord of the Rings license costs money, so it’s unlikely that I’ll have that luxury after 2017. When the end does come, I’ll be saddened by it, but it’ll be like hearing that a business you frequented in your youth has shut down. It’s unfortunate, especially for the people employed there, but from your perspective, your love is in the past and was unlikely to ever be rekindled again.

Maybe a clean break – a sense of closure, if you will – is the best solution for all parties involved. It frees up the resources of the developer to produce something else while also keeping the players from clinging to something they once loved that is now greatly diminished.

the author

Jason Winter is a veteran gaming journalist, he brings a wide range of
experience to MMOBomb, including two years with Beckett Media where he served as the editor of the leading gaming magazine Massive Online
Gamer. He has also written professionally for several gaming websites.

10 Readers Commented

I believe it’s best for MMO developers to just put a game to rest if they don’t plan on continuing to develop content for it. If it isn’t making them enough money to continue development, they should cut their losses, figure out where they went wrong, and dedicate their resources towards making sure their next game doesn’t do that. They should also plan on actually being dedicated to the evolution of that game for the long term.

The one thing that I see very little of in MMOs nowadays is dedication. I mean, how do people think WoW has always been so successful? Blizzard was not a huge company when they were developing WoW and they only had a few successes, but they had amazing passion and dedication to their games. They never rushed things, and they never released half-assed crap. WoW was a massively ambitious project, unlike anything that existed at the time, and it payed off. So what did they do with that pay-off? They dedicated it to bringing more to the game. That is the reason nobody has been able to reach that level of success.

Developers of MMOs don’t get into MMOs because they have ambitious, new ideas that they want to share with the world. They do it because it has the potential to make a lot of money over a long period of time. They’re trying to emulate the success of others, with very little passion and dedication to the game they’re developing. It is simply a means to an end; an end that they will never reach, because they are missing the whole point of game development in the first place. Video games are supposed to be about art and beauty, and full of passion and desire to bring joy to others, but I guess those times are long gone, at least in the realm of MMOs.

Blizz WERE dedicated to content, but then Activision came along, nosed its way in on them (as their publisher) and things instantly began going downhill from there (Cata, MoP and now the disgrace called WoD).

Since muscling it’s way in, Activision has demanded that Blizz do things as cheaply as possible and this is apparent by the utter lack of content and the fact that it’s become more of a ‘soloists’ game – amongst many other lame ducks.

If you want to destroy something good, invite Activision to be its publisher.

That was very sad.. I used love Champions online, till it fall down to Perfect world, i think if they make the deal at the beginning for Marvel Heroes instead of change it to Champions Online, i still play it after those many year for sure.. A simple thing i realize after spend my time and money on MMO´s is, big company’s big brand big investment = great growing content and public, is like you doing a investment on entertainment different from others games like u pay for go to theater watch a movie .

I think some wow private servers are better than most mmos out there…… I play on Warmane for about 5 years, they try to script end game dungeons and raids, and make every class blizzlike for good pvp. Their best expansion is WotLk and it works almost as good as in retail. There are 5000$ 3v3 tournaments every year. They also have Cata and MoP but they are not fully scripted yet. Servers are in Europe but some players are playing from overseas. Player base is around 15000-20000 at every moment. I love pvp in wow so that is why i play, and it’s free. And if private server can make it for more than 5 years why not any other mmo …..

Because the people running the private server (which is illegal btw) don’t do any of the actual development work, or pay for any of the development costs of the game. They are taking an already successful game that normally costs a subscription fee and simply providing a means to access it for free. They aren’t developing and maintaining their own game with their own content. They’re script-kiddies that don’t even have the means or ability to develop their own MMO.

The reasons you listed are actually what should make people think: If people with limited means and ability, and who do not get the steady trickle of subscription, and certainly not from millions of people..if those people can do it, why not the big developers/publishers?

And while they do not pay for the development of the game itself, they still have to pay for their food etc. So they either have to get paid for the development of the private server, or do it in their free time. So either someone *has* to pay for the development, or things happen very slowly.

And yet some mods and private servers receive way more and bigger updates than any random MMO of your choice.

Basically the developers are spending all their resources making and maintaining the games. They would need to hire on script crews to do that work and they already have to shave-the-soap as it is producing the game, the expansions and planning future content. Its a lot harder making and just maintaining these games than most people are aware. I have the unique perspective of having seen what really goes on behind-the-scenes and its kind of insane that these games ever come out, let alone stay afloat. Its hard, often thankless, work. The dedication to creating these scripted events and running them is less cost effective than looking ahead and letting go most times since you can never know what set will be popular or not.